Stop Verizon's Backroom Deal

Your cable and wireless companies are getting into bed together.

Verizon has struck a sweetheart deal with a cartel of cable companies — including Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cox Communications — in which they’ve agreed to stop competing against one another. The new plan? To divvy up the spoils of the growing mobile market.

Whether you use a mobile phone or a desktop computer to access the Internet, this deal is bad news. Verizon is already the largest wireless provider in a consolidated market. If there's no competition to keep carriers in check, prices will continue to spiral upwards and services will decline.

If this deal goes through, the cable giants will hand Verizon a giant chunk of the public airwaves, or spectrum, allowing it to grow even bigger while its wireless competitors wither away. In return, Verizon will promise not to eat into the cable cartel’s broadband business.

If the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department approve this deal, the United States will fall even farther behind on every global measure of broadband access, speed and affordability. Sky-high wireless and broadband bills will rise even higher, even if you're not a Verizon or cable-cartel customer. And even fewer people will be able to afford Internet access.

There’s more. In just a few years more of us will get online with our mobile phones than with a desktop or laptop. But this deal means that Verizon will have an unprecedented amount of control over what we access online, and how.

The good news is that the FCC has demanded that Verizon and its cable-cartel friends give more information about their plan to divide up the Internet for themselves.

And over on Capitol Hill the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee is holding a hearing this week to investigate the dangers of this deal.

We must send a message to policymakers in advance of this week’s hearing: Stop the marriage of Verizon and big cable.

The momentum is on our side. Take action now to beat back this underhanded attempt to carve up our Internet.

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